14 THE BIG ISSUE 29 AUG – 11 SEP 2014
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all give the impression of a disused back alley rather than a
view onto the tropical daydream of a lagoon.
The white birds above, roosting on the beams of the gazebo,
had been content to shuffle around in communal cooing. One
of them now starts to sing; sharp sounds that have a cutting
melody, crystalline and penetrating. The notes race across an
octave in an improvised scale and higher into a register no
instrument would be able to reach, dropping and rising and
carrying the music to a brief delicate crescendo, calmly returning
to noise and up again, reprising the improvisation, until the man
is compelled to lift his head and look up at the singing bird.
Not as small as he first thought, mostly white, with a few
black feathers in its wings and a black head. Generic, of course
– a s equence of noises that marks out territory or a call to
prospective mates, yet for a moment he wonders how much of
the beauty of the song he could attribute to this singular bird.
It feels idiotic to even contemplate the little creature, let alone
consider how responsible for music it is. It’s simply an instinctual
program, as sophisticated as a phone’s ringtone program.
It wasn’t sensible to think of the bird’s tune bearing any relation
to the way a composer might create music – scratching out
his dots and dashes across five evenly spaced lines. Although
perhaps it was just as foolish to think the composer wasn’t
creating music from the hidden impulses of his own species.
He wipes sweat from his face with a handkerchief, leans over
the table again and ruffles his daughter’s sweaty head to help
her hair dry. He breathes out heavily when he settles back on
his bench. A waitress at the restaurant last night said the way
she dealt with the heat was by living in an air-conditioned flat,
driving an air-conditioned car and working in an air-conditioned
restaurant. He imagines the pretty young woman smiling within
a perfectly air-conditioned bubble as she bobbles around from
place to place – never flustered by the heat and never needing to
wipe away a single drop of sweat from her forehead.
He takes out his phone to check for messages. There isn’t
anything new. He scrolls down the list of emails to one he
received three days ago. It had come through overnight, but
he didn’t read it until he got out of a shivering 5am shower,
amid rushing around suitcases and last-minute bags to be
packed, a wife and child arguing in the toilet over the need to
do wee-wee, now, not later, as he organised a taxi to take them
all to the airport.
He found this email telling him that a girlfriend he had loved
– with whom he had lived for two years in a crappy flat near their
dismal university, happy and content for all that, daydreaming
of children and the names they might give them – had died,
and his friend wondered in the email if they could go to the
funeral together. His friend didn’t want to turn up alone and
she assumed he already knew about Cassie going through a red
light on a busy intersection at 8.30 on a Wednesday morning.
Quick and almost painless. Maybe they’d already lowered Cassie
into the hole this morning and soon they would make their way
to the service and no one would really care whether he showed
up or not. He deletes the email from his mobile.
“So, are you ready to go now, sweetie?” he asks. His
daughter nods and says, “Yep.” She takes another bite of the
cookie and throws the other half to the magpie.
LIGHTS WITHIN THE water turn his legs and arms blue. His
fingers and toes wrinkle white. It’s cool rather than cold, but
his teeth chatter and he will have to go inside soon. The resort
is a set of connecting apartments around the pool, a pleasing
open-air lattice of external stairways, landings and balconies,
rising up around him five storeys high and leaving a kidney-
shaped view of the stars. When he’d planned the trip, he’d
imagined celestial powder adrift in an oceanic cosmos – yet
it was the same pinpricks of light through a grey blanket that
he would have seen in Melbourne’s night sky. Either he would
have to get further away from the electric lights of coastal life
or the atmosphere might clear in the next few days.
“What are you looking at?” A young woman is paddling
along near the opposite edge of the pool. He has his back to
the tiled wall, water moving at his sternum. He’s in such a
deep daze that he hadn’t noticed her get into the pool; blinks
at her wordlessly. She kicks along, chin under the waterline.
“Anything up there?” It’s quiet and her voice laps with the
water, as intimate as the whisper of a sweetheart.
“A wooden crate at the end of a parachute.” His face is
lifted, as if watching it drift downwards. Then looks at her.
“A zoological delivery from my friends in the Congo.” She glances
up into the sky and smiles at him when she lowers her face.
“What’s in the Congo crate?” She takes her time getting to
the end of the pool.
“You’ll have to wait and see.” He reaches up a wet hand and
wipes it down over his face – a cooling gesture if he’d made it
during the heat of the day.
“I’m worried it’ll be a crate of mamba snakes.” She places
her arms behind her and with a kick she hoists herself out
of the pool to sit on the edge. “Mamba snakes swim like you
wouldn’t believe.”
She is wearing a white bikini. Maybe fourteen, but she has
developed quickly – a rush into raw beauty. Braces on her
teeth give her age away, as does the tilt of her head when she
smiles. She locks her elbows behind to lean back, extending her
legs before her, wriggling them as mambas might do were they
to fall in the resort’s pool. Her toenails are painted magenta.
“Past your bedtime, isn’t it?” He asks and looks away.
“It’s past everyone’s bedtime.”
He watches the water rippling out across the chlorinated
blue surface. He’d almost been asleep with his eyes open.
“It’s quiet and her voice laps with the water, as intimate as the whisper
of a sweetheart.”